shroud ourselves in the cosmos; let the music play

her favorite trick is blow

out my photographs

Jake: uses it on papers more often than he wants to, always promises himself this is the last time. keeps it a secret from the rest of the team when he does use it because he thinks he should be better than that. a teacher calls him out on it once and he crashes out.

Rachel: also thinks she should be better than that. thankfully for her, she is. miss A-average used it once to see what the fuss was about, immediately spotted several factual errors, and hasn't touched it since. won't openly judge you for using it, but secretly will. except in the case of marco, who she teases incessantly, of course

Tobias: ax sets him up with a jailbroken, hacked smartphone with unlimited data, and he immediately starts using chatgpt for therapy. the rest of the team holds a heavy-handed debate on whether the simulacrum of human contact is helpful/healthy or not. the question gets answered for them when tobias develops chatgpt psychosis and becomes convinced that he is actually a real hawk who just made up being a human. ax ends up blocking his access.

Cassie: unequivocally opposed to any and all uses of chatgpt in any circumstances. will bring up studies of data center water usage & noise pollution any time it is mentioned. convinces rachel to smash up a data center with her, during which she uncovers a secret yeerk plot to brainwash chatgpt users. the team sets out to save an obvious elon musk copy named alan stank from the yeerks. however, in addition to him being incredibly abrasive and repellant, he also sells humanity out to the yeerks, so cassie lets him die. jake expects her to be morally conflicted over this, but she goes on a tirade against alan stank's environmental impact. marco jokes about "eat the rich". there's an unsettling implication that cassie may have done just that.

Marco: constant, incessant, unbearable chatgpt user. uses it for every single school essay, is astonished that none of the rest of them are doing the same. teases rachel & cassie for being nerds who actually do their own homework, teases jake for "joining the dark side" when it comes out that he does occasionally use it, teases tobias for getting too into it. rachel points out the factual errors & says marco's brain will shrink even smaller than it already is. responds that it's fine because he doesn't even read the essays before he turns them in, so he's not actually picking up any false information. everybody hates this for him.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

I think what a lot of people underestimate is just how much road there is in your city. And just how many directions the crew gets pulled.

For our city of around 50k people there are 8 of us.

Also, crack sealing is a wholly temporary measure, meant to slow the break-up of the roads, it’s not a permanent fix.

Roads tend to get closed for months on end because we have to tear the whole thing up, then, depending on the class of road, we either have to hammer-drill into concrete to lay rebar and the pour concrete, or we can get straight to paving. If it’s a road requiring concrete we’re required to wait at least 24 hours for it to set.

So after 2 days we’re finally able to pave. But the city allocates one (two if we’re lucky) 5 ton truck to transport material.

A relatively short paving job requires at a minimum of 60 tons. So that’s 12 trips to the asphalt factory and back. Each ton is around $80.

TL;DR